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Wed, 21 Feb 2018 21:47:37 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Mussolini and Memoryhttp://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/mussolini-and-memory/
http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/mussolini-and-memory/#respondWed, 21 Sep 2016 13:08:08 +0000mevlahos1http://advanced.jhu.edu/?p=107071read more…]]>Rhodes is an ancient city, boasting a 2400-year provenance, with three parent cities on the island that go back even farther than that. Yet, in spite of predominantly Byzantine houses (some 800 years old), the skyline of battlements, the high places like the Grand Master’s Citadel, the very presence and feel of the old city is a Crusader-dream, as if a knight awakened, groggy after the sleep of centuries, to find his ancient world physically unchanged, but in every way also transmogrified to a 21st century theme park.

But why is this so? Rhodes was Greek for 1700 years, it was Ottoman-ruled from 1522 to 1912, then meandering back to modern Greek rule after 30 years or so of Italo-Fascist colonization. In contrast, the Crusader period — the rule of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, or Hospitallers, or Knights of Malta as they are still known — lasted only from 1312 to 1522. Yet theirs is the stamp of myth and memory: The Knights still rule Rhodian identity today. It is they who own Rhodes.

Thank Benito Mussolini for this amazing outcome.

Mussolini took a town run for nearly 400 years by (lax and easygoing) Ottomans, and decided to make some big changes. He ordered all Ottoman-era houses torn down, and all Hospitaller architecture fully and authentically restored. The grand enceinte of walls, moats, and outworks were raised and refaced again. A green zone was created outside the walls by uprooting Muslim and Jewish cemeteries. The Albert Speer of this massive Italian state effort was Florestano Di Fausto. His grand enterprise was not archaeology, but rather, a sort of majestic, time-travel urban planning.

Imagine an entire walled city from the early 16th century, completely recreated — and for what earthly reason, you might ask?

Mussolini had a vision of recreating the Roman Empire, but in his mind it was to be an empire for today, for the world of new technologies, like aviation, new visions of urban life, presented through Rationalist architecture, and above all Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism. This vision, looking to science and the forward trajectory of Modernity, approached the past as malleable historical memory to be aggressively sculpted to add just so much extra oomph to the great agendas of the Faschismo future.

Hence, Mussolini gathered his legions of artists, archaeologists, and architects to remake Rhodes as a prefiguration of his own, urgent and contemporary vision of the New Italy, and also as an advertisement of the West’s cutting edge — by showing how Italians had done so centuries’ past (at the forefront of the Crusading West, of course!).

Here, Fascist Modernism’s greatest effort was made on the palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. The building is a true Castello (in Italian), or Kastron (Greek), or urban citadel. It is majestic, grand: A great square 250 feet to a side, rising high, strongly crenellated, of clean, dressed limestone blocks.

Yet nothing compares to the interior. The most stunning CGI in Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones is nothing compared to the vaulted halls, the corbelled, coffered ceilings of rich hardwoods, the complexly carved, cubic capitals, the porphyry columns, the towering, canopied hearths. It is overwhelming — as it was intended to be.

Because what Mussolini is doing here is setting up and assembling an unforgettable narrative for our collective modern memory of things past — where it whispers to us that this represents no less than the heroic truths of our former selves. Western identity, he is saying (to Italians, as their Duce), is that the Crusader enterprise was the irrefutable prefiguration of the destiny of Italy to be.

Here it helps his cause that the Knights of St. John resemble, in truly uncanny vectors, a prefiguration of the EU today. The Order was organized by Langue (“tongue”), so that the administration and fraternal congregation of the Order delegated to the French langue, the Spanish, the British (English, Irish, and “Hibernian”), the German (including Poles and Bohemians), and most critically, the Italians.

Several of the greatest Grand Masters were Italian, and the great wall-builders that staved off the armies of Mehmet and Suleiman, were also Italian (like Matteo Gioeni, Basilio della Scuola, Gerolamo Bartolucci and Gabriele Tadino da Martinengo). So what Mussolini is telling us — now in faint subconscious — is that Italy in the later 1930s was the leader of a new concert of powers — which he so brazenly insinuated at the Munich Conference in 1938.

Mussolini was in hot pursuit of an urgent vision, through which historically potent symbolism might give Fascist Italy bigger authority. We know the the tragic end of this Fascist mission, but what we forget is the one place it still seems to triumphantly succeed — in Rhodes.

When Mussolini’s “monuments men” completed their labors at the palace of the Grand Master, they justly celebrated their triumph with late Fascist frescoes, in a smallish room that is now the gift shop. These frescoes, placed in sacral niche like those of a late Byzantine church, tell the whole story.

Those who imagine risorgimento and renovatio with canvas and brush: Bringing to imagination the colonial dream of Era Fascista!

The doughty stonemasons — (for American elite reference) no different than those who cut and carved Branford and Stiles at Yale in the 1920s — the glory of Italy!

And then, the stalwart, long-suffering Greek subjects of Impero Italiano, indentured in Modernity just as through four centuries in the Tourkrokratia, or for two centuries during the glorious, prefigured EU of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, 1312-1522. Then, as now, serfdom is still serfdom.

Finally, tellingly and positioned strategically, there are two celebratory plaques enunciating Fascist resurrection of Knights’ glory. Each marble sheet speaks to the grandeur of the new Italy, but each ends, portentously, with two etched calendar years. The second of these reads, Era Faschista XVIII.

We are still celebrating this narrative — still vibrant in movies like Kingdom of Heaven or even redacted in soap opera sagas like Game of Thrones — and we have not a clue how Mussolini can capture us, and still reach us.

The lesson — or warning — in the perfectly cut and mortared limestone blocks of Rhodes is that great human periods of upheaval and transformation are almost never remembered as they happened — meaning, as they were actually experienced by the people who lived through them, or died in them. Instead, they are remembered as we choose to recreate them, for ourselves in the living present — or for whatever vision we support has chosen to exalt.

The end of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem at Rhodes, bowing at last to Ottoman might, was part of a systemic transformation of the late medieval oikoumene (world system) that began with the fierce assault of the Black Death in 1347. Hitting Constantinople hardest, it ushered in a new order in the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant, and almost undid Western Europe’s hold on its heartland in Rome and Vienna. As it was, the entire Orthodox world (minus Muscovy) came under Muslim rule between 1350 and 1550.

But today we remember only the gallant, stainless knights, sitting on their unearned wealth just like Dashiell Hammett lovingly etched in the Maltese Falcon. We have no sense at all of the tenacious ligaments of Mussolini’s failed vision, but we all still twitch reflexively to what he created. Rhodes today is all about enduring literary romance — a Crusader red cross — and nothing at all about the fateful transformation of the Mediterranean and European worlds, 500 hundred years ago.

This is of course Peter Breugel, and the most famous of his three Tower of Babel paintings. What was he saying? His first theme is that of pride punished, as in his 1563 canvas, The Suicide of Saul. Is there anything more prideful than our stainless, adamantine world system? As Bruegel dissects the intricate architecture of the tower, we can see building frenetically proceeding at the heights, even while the foundations are unfinished — indeed, there is cracking and crumbling to pace the glittering limestone facing. Breugel’s second theme is the inescapable futility of human enterprise, undone even as it reaches for the heavens. We venerate a world system both making, and unmaking itself.

Yet if Breugel is the frontpiece visor of a glorious helmet (or armet), Zdeněk Michael František Burian is the rondel in the back of the headpiece, at the nape of the neck. Burian was the pioneer artist of the paleolithic, and his canvases and murals are still a wonder. Here, from 1951, and his idiosyncratic perch on the 20th century male zeitgeist, he nonetheless offers a vision of alternative promise. Here is the Shaman crafting a Magdalenian Venus, the totem figurine of another vision of human meaning, and a wholly orthogonal construction of the sacred, in contrast to Nimrod‘s realization in monumental architecture, or the iron stare of Ozymandius. Today’s world system is not the only path for humanity.

Our final meeting was about — as it should be — What we learned. But what have we really learned — when it comes to thinking about world crisis? Have we learned to think about solving difficult human problems, or have we learned that our established world is fine with thinking about solving difficult human problems — as long as those problems do not threaten to overturn the established order?

Of all things we know, that are revealed to us daily, we know that the powers-that-be do not want to talk about world crisis. This realization alone is justification for this course. But if so many in power do not want to think about it, then our challenge is underscored.

What is a world crisis? — Is crisis about massive destruction, suffering, and human triage, or is it more usefully focused on the global network coming apart, and thus the problem of saving the system itself?

How do we get to world system crisis? — Is crisis about big hits — from Earth or Nature — that surprise us, or that we somehow fail to catch in time — or is it more deeply a widespread, and rust-scale corrosive loss of belief in elites, their ideas, and their institutions?

Should we prepare for world crisis — does preparation even matter? All action talk and policy today is about forestalling crisis — climate change, pandemic — yet never about mitigation. But going further, can we ever mitigate in advance what we believe we can still forestall? If full mobilization is our best response, how can we mobilize before the crisis is fully upon us?

So if we have trouble defining world crisis, and trouble coming up with a narrative that motivates us, and even more trouble figuring out — even hypothetically — what to do, then maybe we should come at the problem through opposition.

Why not posit seven reasons world crisis is unlikely or impossible, and then see how those optimistic enunciations hold up?

We have institutions that are responsible for identifying big problems early on

We have global remediative institutions with international authority, stronger than ever before

We have active strategic indicators and warning systems in place, distributed worldwide

We have the capacity, almost worldwide, to potentially initiate full mobilization of humanity

Humanity today is far more risk-averse, older, and more literate than every before

There is less trust in ruling institutions, but fear of the unknown without them is much greater

Alternative civilizational outcomes seem more backward-looking, more stratified than the present system

Your response to this portrait of the impossible was forthright, eloquent, and uncompromising:

Just the fact that we have alerting institutions doesn’t mean anybody is going to listen to them — you said the problem was actually much worse than that — in fact you said that the whole climate change debate has become so politically poisonous that it literally ensures every worst outcome we might ever imagine being visited on humanity by our centuries’-swagger.

Remediation as policy doesn’t mean making things better, it is just policy talking about making them better — and policy and its talk means nothing when it comes to real crisis.

Mobilization worked in 1914 only because millions believed in sacrifice to the nation — and millions do not believe today. The claim of the nation state on the lives of its citizens has shrunk remarkably since 1914. That would be me talking — but you went further. What you said unequivocally was that loss of trust represents a direct threat to regime elites, and leads them — not to mobilization — but rather the need to control.

Restless societies share a proclivity to rebel when under stress. Western societies are no less vulnerable to political upheaval than any other in history — especially when faced with existential threat. You said that, in the wake of Ferguson and last summer, that America is more restive than we had ever thought was possible.

Compliance to elite rule and its promises can end in an instant — they moment elites truly fail to deliver, and citizen means of rebellion are far greater now, with a more active, armed, and literate citizenry.

When the world we know fails, we instantly become ready to entertain other promises. But that is a promise right out of the 1960s. You said something different and far more sobering. You said that the US has not yet really been tested. You said that the world wars were not true system threats — so that Americans do not really know what a time of real collective tribulation might mean.

You told me all this in our final class — you all were adamant that things can happen, and that Earth and Nature are like wedges that change the entire context of how we see the established world system around us. You told me that it could all be overturned in 50 years — or less. You even expect this to happen.

You did not default to gelded Policy-Speak. You had a sterner voice. Maybe Americans should listen.

]]>http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/where-we-ended-up-on-world-crisis/feed/0Counterintuitive and orthogonal findings on world crisishttp://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/counterintuitive-and-orthogonal-findings-on-world-crisis/
http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/counterintuitive-and-orthogonal-findings-on-world-crisis/#respondSat, 04 Jul 2015 17:23:45 +0000mevlahos1http://advanced.jhu.edu/?p=86077read more…]]>World Crisis — “Ashen Truths” — was first taught last summer. Our initial findings are worth revisiting, and only in part because we touched upon some of the same insights. This summer’s second iteration has confirmed abiding continuities in world system crisis, like these:

“The established human system itself unknowingly promotes and encourages crisis.” We know that too.

Nature is an enabler “rather than the main forcing function of world system crisis.” This assertion can be debated, but the intended point is that what separates a natural disaster and simple recovery from a natural disaster followed by system crisis is the triggering of pent-up human dynamics of change.

“The wealth and relative quality of life for ordinary people improves after world crisis, along with more freedom and political liberty.” I am not sure whether or not we have come to a ringing agreement on this, but we have nonetheless noted in our case studies, the paradoxical positives that have come historically from world crisis.

But perhaps of greatest interest are those different, even orthogonal findings, like these:

Across the historical range of our case studies is what may be to some perhaps an irony, yet to others more certainly a ringing affirmation of human evolution: Namely, that the wreckage and recovery time after each succeeding system crisis is historically decreasing. Yet the world crises get bigger, in terms of enfolding more and more of humanity each time, and bigger in absolute scale as well. Is this simply a sign of evolving human resilience — on a world system scale? If it is, then the chances for a truly destabilizing future system crisis diminish over time, and world stability increases as a historical function.

But what if we are seeing, in contrast, simply a growing aversion to the disruptive and the unknown? The world population is aging at an amazing rate, and we know that risk aversion skyrockets with advancing age. Humanity has also experienced a long surge in global income growth, and people just climbing out of poverty and entering the bottom rung of middle class life are equally risk averse. We know people are increasingly disinclined to conflict: The decline of war may fit into a pattern of a crisis-avoidance humanity.

What we might call a “crisis-avoidance humanity” is arguably a state of collective consciousness orthogonal to earlier world systems, where war and revolution were often raucously embraced. Societies dead-set against upheaval would arguably be a) more tolerant of austerity and hardship, as long as their basic way of life was preserved, b) more acquiescent to state authority, even tyranny, as long as certain things were kept stable, c) more accepting of inequality, both political and economic, as long as the beneficiary establishment continues to guarantee personal and family stability.

This is turn means that there is less overall stress on the established order, and a greater willingness to put up with a rules-driven and enforced, heavily controlled society. This is a recipe for a more stratified world, and what such an outcome means for the world system is quite simply a much, much higher bar for big change. Think of it: People are collectively afraid of change and desperately want to keep what they have: Ruling elites and establishments can establish an order that decisively advantages them, without penalty. What does the rise an atrophied, conservative, and yet stable world system mean for the prospects of some future world system crisis?

First, in contrast to previous crises, it means that crisis-precipitation must come at a much higher level of force and impetus. Future world crisis would have to break down the emotional investment in stability and acquiescence to high levels of inequality and austerity already present in daily life.

Second, the disruptive dynamic must come as a surprise, for which the established order is not prepared. Furthermore, the shock of disruption must in itself constitute an existential severance of civic trust, that overwhelms the emotional investment people have made in acquiescing to the current system.

Third, the dynamic capacity un-utilized (or ignored) in the prevailing system must be quickly mobilized into alternative human constructions. This translates into ideas and movements that have hitherto clung to the margins, that can suddenly move now to the center, and make new human offers. Part of such new empowerment involves appropriating existing networks that can be brought into play for creative, and insurgent, alternative use.

But would such a future crisis — really — be so different, either in character or form, from the earlier blow-ups we have studied? Was life in Late Antiquity or the High Middle Ages any less stratified and controlled? Were the nations of Modernity also not tremendous — and tragic — examples of societies that had proven themselves willing to sacrifice, unto the millions — for unworthy and corrupt royal states — in World War I? And did the people so abused and injured not unreasonably rebel against the usury of elites that had not only betrayed them once in the trenches, only to dig the knife in harder, yet again, in the ruthless inequality of the “Roaring 20s” — the boom-bust that finally broke America and Germany’s very way of life?

So maybe we are not so different today.

]]>http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/counterintuitive-and-orthogonal-findings-on-world-crisis/feed/0So how will we think about world crisis?http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/so-how-will-we-think-about-world-crisis/
http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/so-how-will-we-think-about-world-crisis/#respondSun, 28 Jun 2015 21:52:55 +0000mevlahos1http://advanced.jhu.edu/?p=85945read more…]]>

How do we create a useful framework for assessing world crisis? The world, and humanity, is too vast for any model to encompass. But it may be possible to come up with a simple template that identifies and works with a few critical drivers of change and stress to the world system.

Let us then posit 8 realms of change on which to focus:

Brittleness of the Old Order

New Visions of Humanity

World Environment

Food and Water

Global Energy Demand and Supply

Big Migrations

Health and Pandemic

The Globalized Economy

These are people and nature realms, together, and what is happening in one affects the others: People and Nature, the whole planet.

Then add to this mix five successive questions for net assessment, representing a crisis vector of growth, development, and culmination of crisis:

How will the problem manifest itself and develop? How does it influcence and interact with other system stresses?

How do we characterize the “tipping point” of this problem — How do problems become system threatening?

How big, how system-wide, how damaging and destructive is the world crisis driven in part by this problem?

Can crisis damage be mitigated before its onset? Or, can mitigation be initiated only after the fact? Or not at all?

After crisis passes, what is required to reconstitute or rebuild the system? What is the timeline for renewal?

Put this together, and we have a matrix of world crisis:

How crisis shows itself and develops

Tipping points- System threatened

Crisis bigness scale and tempo

Crisis mitigation- When and how soon

Time & effort to rebuild

Brittleness of the Old Order

New Visions of Humanity

World Environment

Food and Water

Global Energy Demand

Large-scale migrations

Human healthPandemics

Globalized economy

So how do we begin to fill it in? For example, what do the “realms” of stress and change really mean? We are analyzing stress and change, after all, with the power to bring down the world system. What sort of force does it take to do that?

Hence, what does “brittleness of the old order” really mean? We understand, at some level, that loss of trust in established rule is a necessary precondition for social revolution, but loss of trust has to go a long way for people to take up arms and take to the streets. Going further, how does a loss of trust in government actually become a world crisis-contributing problem? What distinguishes a popular cult from a truly new vision of humanity. Then, what does it take for a “new vision of humanity” to really begin to rock the system? How does the “world environment” get so unliveable — without counterveiling intervention — that it threatens to bring down the system itself? What is more system-cracking, a pandemic environment constantly threatening to wipe out societies, or a superstorm from the blue, that sweeps the globe in a couple months, killing 80%, but then is gone?

In each of the four great world crises humanity has weathered — human action has been the critical and necessary enabler of system destruction. We must remember that it is just as likely that states and societies will respond in ways that will accelerate or make inevitable a developing crisis, as it is that we all band together in a kumbaya moment like a Hollywood movie, and save civilization at the last moment. For example, in a world crisis developing in our time, large states may rush out on their own to try and save the collapsing environment by trying to terraform earth. The arguments in favor will be too persuasive to deny, like this little clarion call — but the actual consequences may be catastrophic. More calamitous yet will be the human conflict — of all possible kinds — generated by global stress. In the end, the very breakers of the world system are always us.

Remember too, however, that even the worst catastrophes can lead to new human beginnings. Migrations are destuctive, but have also created new civilizations. A collapsed world economy can lead to more equitable distribution of income and wealth, and reorderings of status and opportunity that create a happier society for those who survive. World system crisis also inspires amazing creativity — and the cultural and technology breakthroughs have moved humanity forward, both in Late Antiquity, the High Middle Ages, and the time of Modernity’s two world wars.

The effort we make here is to develop targeted, notional assessments of a world system crisis — to better understanding better how to think about the far side over the edge of big problems and big change — we want to photograph the Black Swan before we see it. We are not in the business of trying to predict what is going to happen. We are looking at a world system crisis to understand why and how such a crisis might happen. We are not in the entertainment business, playing with parables of the end of the world.

Late Antiquity encompassed a protracted, multi-crisis system breakdown and transformation. It might represent the most complex, and longest-lasting upheaval in historical memory. I have tried to distill and simplify our understanding of this period for the purposes of the course — Namely, identifying and weighing the factors that lead to system crisis.

In analyzing Late Antiquity with an eye to thinking about crisis in the contemporary world system, we should have a clear sense of crisis boundaries and crisis/recovery periods.

On boundaries: The world system put under crisis in Late Antiquity encompassed the Roman and Sassanian Empires, the Germanic peoples, Berber peoples, Ethiopia, Arabia, and the horn of Africa, plus the steppe peoples of Ukraine, into Central Asia. This Oikoumene (or, “known world”) is not only large, it is tightly interconnected.

On periodization: Late Antiquity is rent and driven by three crises:

1-The crisis of the 3rd century (235-284) which opens up a divergence between East and West within the Roman Empire, and creates space in the empire for “new participants” and “non-state actors” (aka, barbarians and terrorists to a Roman person),

2-Collapse of the Western empire (376-476), a rolling coming apart of governance and political institutions, also paced by vigorious migrations, economic dislocation, and a massive subsidence in Mediterranean trade,

3-Transformation and subsidence in the East, initiated by a massive plague that led to the collapse of Roman governance in Italy, a big decline in urban life throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, culminating in a superpower conflict (602-628), which debilitated both Roman and Persian power, opening the way for the Islamic conquest of the Middle East (after 636).

By the end of the 7th century, there is no longer an interconnected world system, but rather, many local cultural and economic little worlds, all only tenuous tied to each other.

Seven factors are present in this great human upheaval and transformation. Each of them is relevant to the world situation today; and their potential combination and interaction, as in Late Antiquity, may be the dynamic of the next world crisis. Sorting out that potential is our task.

1-Concentration of wealth, spread of servitude

2-Militarization, de-civicizing of state

3-Mass transformations of collective consciousness

4-Mass migrations of peoples

5-Climate change and pandemic

6-State failure; political localization

7-Subsidence of trade and economy

Some illustrative charts here, from Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome, Ugo Barki’s Peak Civilization, highlight military collapse, trade collapse, crisis impact West and East, collapse of the monetary economy, and population swings (in Egypt):

]]>http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/distilling-the-crises-of-late-antiquity/feed/0Kinshiphttp://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/kinship/
http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/kinship/#respondWed, 27 May 2015 18:54:46 +0000mevlahos1http://advanced.jhu.edu/?p=85045read more…]]>This note addresses the problem of kinship — a term used loosely, and misused often — in American intelligence and security analysis. Can we understand the significance of kinship — both ritual and real — in human affairs in ways that ward off institutional bias and emotion-based thinking?

Kinship is the basis of all relationships between human communities.

Original human groups connected to others through out-marriage (exogamy), or actual kinship. Paleolithic truth changed in the Neolithic, as larger communities found new ways of defining identity. Greek city-states planted colonies as children, which became kindred new city states. Medieval kinship became ritualized through marriage ties between ruling families, establishing a kinship of elite rule.

Imagined Kinship emerged from modernity’s revolutions. The American and French revolutions invented the nation as an imagined community, and then extrapolated kindred relationships with other new nations that shared their revolutionary spirit. Just as national citizenship (kinship) was based on sworn affirmation, so kinship with other nations was based on their like-minded affirmation of shared political ideals. This was a Universalist credo of belonging.

American imagined kinship transformed in 1945. Until World War II, the United States was the universal nation only at arms’ length and in prospect. Moreover, American universalism has been millenarian and apocalyptic in practice. A kin, not-kin directive in rhetoric and in practice drove relationships with other nations. Hence BLUE, GREEN, and RED became ideologically defined colors that described American progress among humanity in terms of kin, not-kin status.

American maps show the power of color-ideology, and its evolution

This early World War II map from Fortune magazine not only brings home to readers the majesty and inevitability of United Nations’ victory, but also, We Are the World. The only true neutrals — i.e., GREEN — are Sweden, Switzerland, Irish Free State, Portugal, and Argentina. This is a BLUE vs. RED world in the making.

Here is that world, at Cold War inception, fully realized. There is no GREEN whatsoever. Decolonization and the Bandung ideology of a “Third World will change that picture by the 1970s, with GREEN now emergent as a third force:

This is the post-Vietnam low-point. By 9-11, America is back to BLUE vs. RED, as we saw in a sort of Second Coming as “The Pentagon’s New Map:”

The terms of American imagined kinship are changing. Currents in politics suggest that American universalism is in flux. World kinship ties may be transforming for the first time since 1945. A less apocalyptic national vision may mean a more “realist” construct of national interest. Our conference idea that GREEN represents the world — not just those outside of America’s world family — suggests change within the American Mind. To say RED is an environmental condition, rather than evil, backs off from the millenarian. Finally, thinking of BLUE as just America and its closest friends is a post-universalist state of mind.

This post is not about breaking news in climate change — what may happen — but rather to focus our thinking on potential climate change impacts on net assessment: What does earth change mean to humanity and its world system?

The spill on glaciers and ice sheets: First Mount Everest and the Himalayan glaciation —

]]>http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/the-latest-on-ice/feed/0Our Judgments — Of a New World in the Makinghttp://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/78925/
http://advanced.jhu.edu/blog/78925/#respondThu, 31 Jul 2014 18:32:10 +0000mevlahos1http://advanced.jhu.edu/?p=78925read more…]]>

What is a world crisis? Why study it?

“Ashen Truths: Tracking and Bounding World Crisis” is a collegial attempt — by 10 Master’s students and a teacher — to frame a problem. That problem is the periodic coming apart and subsidence of large human systems. These periodic crises are well attested in history, but positioned in our collective consciousness almost wholly within their own, unique contexts.

Hence we know about the sudden collapse of the Bronze Age, the so-called fall of Rome, the end of Antiquity, the Black Death, and our calamitous world wars — but we know each of them only through their stories. But from the perspective of large human systems, these world-shaking eras have a lot in common — they represent a direct challenge to the viability of large human systems. Human systems have evolved for four thousand years, growing from cultures sharing trade and art, to culture areas sharing language and belief, to “worlds” bound together in a web of common institutions and way of life. Our awkward word for this now is “globalization.”

Periodic system crisis threatens system continuity. History’s stories tell us how big such threats were in our past. Civilization’s urban network collapses. Literacy departs. Monetary economy ends. Up to a third of the population dead, with much higher mortality in places densest and richest — at its worst. This is a problem to be framed because humanity today is not free of the prospect of a future world crisis. There is no reason to believe that such periodic crisis is behind us — in fact, the repeated persistence of such crisis historically suggests that it will happen again. Moreover, the near-miss crises are legion — as recently as the financial panic and Great Recession of 2008. How best to study world system crisis?

Our course chose to avoid world model building, either predictive or outcome-oriented. Instead, we compared our set of five historical cases of world crisis (1-12th century BCE, 2-5th century ACE, 3-7th century, 4-14th century, 5-20th century), and attempted to identify common dynamics as to the sources, onset, tipping points, severity, and consequences of crisis, as well as the ways in which the world system responded and ultimately reconstituted itself.

The template we used for our thinking is the net assessment framework — developed in the 20th century decades’ of global and cold war. What makes the idea of a global net assessment template attractive is that its intellectual wiring is already integral to how our current establishment does business analysis — we all do “net assessment” — so that our establishment should see right away that we are using a socially reified tool to talk about world possibilities that this same establishment finds uncomfortable.

Here are some of our (perhaps uncomfortable) insights:

A major finding identifies the dynamic role, in each historical case, of multiple inputs and positive feedback mechanisms promoting crisis — and the corollary judgment that human response to system crisis is broadly consistent over the centuries.

A second major finding is how the established human system itself unknowingly promotes and encourages crisis. The major causal dynamic here, varying but consistent in each historical case, is how resistance to human demands for change helps undercut the ruling establishment and corrodes its authority. Moreover, the very structure of the network system itself, under attack, becomes a decisive vector promoting forces that would bring the network down.

A third finding is that “natural” or earth-forces stressing the system — whether or not they are of some human agency — are still enablers rather than the main forcing function of world system crisis. This means that, no matter how materially destructive climate change or pandemic might be, for example, their real power is in how they trigger/push/force change already long demanded and frustrated within the human system (by a resistant established order).

Some findings were truly unexpected. Our stories from history are unambiguous in their received teaching. They tell us — horror of horrors — that system crisis is a calamity to be avoided at all costs. But the evidentiary record tells us something very different. It tells us that the wealth and relative quality of life for ordinary people improves after world crisis, along with more freedom and political liberty. The deep humbling of the established order not only benefits the people unambiguously — it also encourages new human ideas, and what we might call new human notions of what civilization is, and means for all of us.

Greeks called this syncretism — and it is essential to human cultural evolution. Sometimes new things come only from the collapse of old things.

Dear Class, We talked about trying to draw useful distinctions between dimensions of severity in world crisis. There is a four-degree scale for burns. Can we apply a comparable template to our world crisis historical case studies?

Hence, a first degree world crisis is marked by surface damage only. World War II, for all its terrible human toll (~100 million dead), was thus a first degree crisis, when looked at in terms of systemic impact, “way of life” change, and even the human cost:

System impact:

Comes apart, briefly.

Localized, short-term subsidence.

Rapid reconstitution

High system continuity — new system much strengthened.

Way of life change:

Big hit, short-term.

Huge postwar surge.

Long-term wealth and global quality of life gain.

Human cost:

Global: ~5%

USSR overall: 15%

Pol./Bel./Ukr.: 20%

China: 7%

Crisis severity in the High Middle Ages — during the peak period of the Black Death and initial Little Ice Age — was much higher and the systemic and human impacts much more prolonged. The integrated world system described so eloquently by Janet Abu-Lughod was broken by the upheavals of the early to mid-14th century.

System impact:

Single sytem broken into three systems

Division lasts for 400-450 years

Subsidence, then growth (intra-system trade, but no integration)

Way of life change:

More wealth/capita

More human freedom/capita

More political leverage/capita

Human cost:

Europe: 30%

Mongol Khanate collapses

200 year population recovery

The third degree of world crisis, like a deep burn, goes well below the surface. The prolonged coming apart of Late Antiquity happened in two distinct phases, West and then East. The Western Roman Empire sputtered out from 455-475. This seems abrupt, but the “fall” was about a gathering decline in land usage, population, and capital investment. In contrast, the East not only remained healthy and rich (about 20x wealthier than the Late West) but even felt strong enough to reclaim much of the Western Empire in the 6th century. But even during that surge, climate change and attendant plague devastated the East. Just as the long Gothic War tore apart classical Italy forever, the Persian War destroyed the Greco-Roman East, opening the triumph of Islam.

Then there is the final category, the fourth degree. Although we did not treat the end of the Bronze Age in depth, as a case study the utter collapse of civilization at the end of the 12th century BCE ranks as the most severe historical world crisis. What forensic archaeology now shows us is a portrait of the return to what we can call a baseline, from which the network does not recover or reconstitute, but rather, must be invented anew, centuries later.